Discovering Fiction is a two-level reading series that introduces students to authentic American literature. Student s Book 2 is an anthology of eighteen short stories by contemporary and classic American authors, including Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, and Shirley Jackson. The stories have universal appeal that will touch students and make them think. Designed for high-intermediate to advanced students, the text provides interactive, integrated skills lessons developed around each story. Pre-reading sections include prior knowledge questions, author biographies, discussions of literary terms, and reviews of idioms and expressions found in the stories. Accompanying grammar exercises help students overcome such trouble areas as prepositions, articles, and irregular verbs. Also included are vocabulary sections, reading comprehension questions, and thought-provoking discussion and writing topics. Review sections tie the stories together and provide review tests.

Over the past twenty years, Chinese novelist Yan Lianke has emerged as one of the most important writers in the world. In Discovering Fiction, Yan offers insights into his views on literature and realism, the major works that inspired him, and his theories of writing. He juxtaposes discussions of the high realism of Leo Tolstoy and Lu Xun against Franz Kafka’s modernism and Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism, charting the relationship between causality, truth, and modes of realism. He also discusses his approach to realism, which he terms “mythorealism”—a way of capturing the world’s underlying truth by relying on the allegories, myths, legends, and dreamscapes that emerge from daily life. Revealing and instructive, Discovering Fiction gives readers an unprecedented look into the mind and art of a literary giant.

Authentic North American short stories enhance students' reading skills, language learning, and enjoyment of literature. The Teacher's Manual provides tips and strategies on how to teach the different exercise types in a chapter. In addition, the authors provide interpretative commentary on the readings, helping teachers gain a literary appreciation of the text. Finally, a complete answer key is provided, including suggested answers to the critical thinking questions.

Equips students to read and understand authentic short stories with vocabulary, reading, and critical thinking skills. Classic and contemporary stories give students a thorough background in North American literature. Every chapter gives students practice in guessing meaning from context, which research shows is one of the most important skills for reading unadapted texts. Students also learn to think critically, make inferences, discuss what they read and write responses to the work. --

Equips students to read and understand great literature with vocabulary, reading, and critical thinking skills. Features: classic and contemporary stories give students a thorough background in North American literature; every chapter gives students practice in guessing meaning from context; students also learn to think critically, make inferences, discuss what they read, and write responses to the work. --

Discovering Fiction features short stories that enhance students' reading skills, language learning, and enjoyment of literature. Discovering Fiction, Second Edition, Student's Book 1 presents stories with universal appeal to engage students and make them think critically. Among the authors included are O. Henry, William Saroyan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Isaac Asimov, and Sandra Cisneros. Extensive pre-reading activities capture students' interest. Post-reading activities check their comprehension, increase their knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, and provide thought-provoking discussion and writing assignments. Literary term explanations and tasks enhance students' appreciation of literature.

Xie analyzes three novels by the international award-winning Chinese writer Yan Lianke and investigates how his signature “mythorealist” form produces textual meanings that subvert the totalizing reality prescribed by literary realism. The term mythorealism, which Yan coined to describe his own writing style, refers to a set of literary devices that incorporate both Chinese and Western literary elements while remaining primarily grounded in Chinese folk culture and literary tradition. In his use of mythorealism, carrying a burden of social critique that cannot allow itself to become “political,” Yan transcends the temporality and provinciality of immediate social events and transforms his potential socio-political commentaries into more diversified concerns for humanity, existential issues, and spiritual crisis. Xie identifies three modes of mythorealist narrative exemplified in Yan’s three novels: the minjian (folk) mode in Dream of Ding Village, the allusive mode in Ballad, Hymn, Ode, and the enigmatic mode in The Four Books. By positioning itself against an ambiguous articulation of social determinants of historical events that would perhaps be more straightforward in a purely realist text, each mode of mythorealism moves its narrative from the overt politicality of the subject matter to the existential riddle of negotiating an alternative reality. A groundbreaking study of one of contemporary China’s most important authors that will be of great value to scholars and students of Chinese literature.

"From 1570 to 1630 prose fiction was an upstart in English culture, still defined in relation to poetry and drama yet invested with its own considerable power and potential. In these years, a community of writers arrived on the scene in London and strove to make a name for themselves largely from the prose that they produced at an astonishing rate. Modern scholars of the Renaissance have attempted to measure this prose against such standards as humanist culture or the emerging novel. But the prose fiction written by Lyly, Greene, and their imitators has eluded modern readers even more than the works of Shakespeare and Spenser. In Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction, Reid Barbour studies three interwoven case histories - those of Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Dekker - and explores their favorite tropes and figures. In response to one another, these three writers attempt to define, liberate, and question the boundaries of prose. That is, they want to secure for prose a new and powerful status in an age when its parameters are unclear and its rivals still valorized but its parameters unbounded. Barbour argues that Nashe absorbs but also rejects the agendas of Greene's prose, offering alternative tropes in their place. Dekker parodies Nashe but unsettles any scheme for stabilizing prose, including those set forth by Nashe himself." "This work centers on three terms that Greene, Nashe, and Dekker obviously could not get off their minds: decipher, discover, and stuff. The first two terms, pervasive in Greene, make specific and complex demands on narrative and its readers. With stuff however, Nashe and Dekker cultivate an extemporal and a material prose, and challenge the fictions that decipher and discover, from romance to roguery. These key words not only situate prose in regard to poetry, drama, and the world; they also raise crucial Renaissance questions about order and duty, faith and doubt. Accordingly, their frame of reference extends from Renaissance poetics and narratology to a nascent Epicureanism and neoskepticism. In an about-face, prose becomes the standard by which the rest of Elizabethan and early Stuart culture is measured, even as prose is constituted by that culture." "With three of the most popular English Renaissance writers as his focus, Barbour reassesses the question of how (or whether) Elizabethan fiction is an ancestor of the novel. Students of the novel have recently intensified their search for the origins of Defoe, Dickens, and Woolf. But Elizabethan prose fiction challenges the novel rather than founds it. In its conclusion, then, Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction considers responses to Elizabethan prose, from Behn to Joyce."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 provides insight into the critical traditions shaping the literary landscape of modern Britain.